THE MERCY The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island eighty-three years ago was named the Mercy. She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandanna and taught her the word "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on; then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space without limit rushing off to the corners of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish to find her family in New York, prayers unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness before she woke, that kept the Mercy afloat while smallpox raged among the passengers and crew until the dead were buried at sea with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. The Merc)', I read on the yellowing pages of a book I located in a windowless room of the library on Forty-second Street, sat thirty-one days offshore in quarantine before the passengers disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships arrived, Tancred out of Glasgow, the Neptune, registered as Danish, Umberto IV, the list goes on for pages, November gives way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. Italian miners from Piemonte dig under towns in western Pennsylvania only to rediscover the same nightmare they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough. -PHIIlP LEVINE his activities that resolved the tension between obligation and pleasure, and he never seemed to tire of it or feel guilty about it. He met young sexual partners by teaching, but his teaching was also erotic in a larger sense: he inspired young musicians, passing on to them life and power. In his last years, he had a particular need for disciples: perhaps it was a way of surpassing his father by being generous as well as wise. At the moment, Bernstein's peda- gogic genius falls into a culture that is far more ignorant of-and indifferent to-classical music than was the soci- ety that nurtured his early success. He would have hated the fragmentation and ethnic chauvinism of the nine- ties-the attack on European culture and the authority of the masterpiece tradition-and he would probably have had little faith in "crossover," in which pop musicians play in classical concerts and neither pop nor classical quite gets its due. He wanted to com- bine musical virtues and styles into 53 new hybrid forms, not to water things down. While Bernstein was working hard in the United States, he advanced the project of creating a major Ameri- can musical culture, but that project faded when he withdrew from New York In one of those baffling American cultural scandals, the Young People's Concerts have been widely broadcast in Japan and Europe, but corporate sponsorship cannot be found to rebroad- cast them here. (They are, however, available on video, from the Leonard Bernstein Society, in New York.) Commenting on the media's general lack of interest in serious art, Bern- stein's most celebrated protégé, Mi- chael Tilson Thomas, says, "There's now an agreement that no major state- ment can be made in high culture, and that's just the result of the endless hyping of pop." Tilson Thomas is voicing a familiar complaint, but one must point out that the media have become so compartmentalized that even another Leonard Bernstein would not command center stage. Nonetheless, if classical music seems stunted these days, Bernstein's in- fluence still sends up shoots. The re- cent return to a broad-gauged tonality among serious composers-a trend that was well under way during Bern- stein's lifetime-certainly received im- petus from his compositional practice. The brilliant young composer Aaron Jay Kernis describes Bernstein as a "role model for a lot of American composers," praising, in particular, Bernstein's assimilation of big-band swing and Latin elements into his music. Among the leading American conductor,s, Leonard Slatkin, at the National Symphony Orchestra, and Tilson Thomas, in San Francisco, have, with notable success, absorbed from Bernstein the lesson that an American music director must both lead the public and consult with it. In time, Bernstein's failures will drop away, and he will be remembered for his best work-his masterpieces of com- posing, conducting, and teaching. But at the moment his death seems part of a cultural defeat. Not only has the sense of risk-taking disappeared from the classical scene but so has the quality that was Bernstein's supreme gift to Amer- ica's postwar cultural life-the fun. .